Soooo, the Jacksonville Appointment!
I arrived at my Jacksonville appointment at 9:30AM because I don't know about no east coast time zone. There's math in that.
Straight to the coffee machine went white74westy and I, so I could show him that I did not even have the mental acuity to figure out how to make a lousy cup of coffee. "I don't drink the stuff," he tells me.
I noted that we had a transaxle on the ground, the engine listing severely at an angle on the engine stand, and oh yeah, no seats, no dash, no lower windshield channel, no windows, but there were two bumpers in there. Me thinks we won't be driving so much.
The day begins at the end of the prior night's stymie, what to do with the overly long muffler studs?
"Cut 'em off."
We had a major high-torque Makita grinding wheel that made short work of those studs and anything else that got anywhere near.
Here he is wire-wheeling the heater valve riser pipe:
Muffler on, now we had to address the upside down engine on the Leaning Tower Of Engine Stand. The engine was at such an angle, that we could not even rotate the yoke without the engine carrier bashing into the chassis of the stand. Engine stand engineering . . . a dying artform. Finally, we pulled the safety pin and partially unbolted the engine from the stand, much to white74westy's consternation, and sort of dead-lifted/heaved the engine over the stand's chassis right side up .
We then came up with such a rickety assemblage of plywood and wood remnants teetering on a floor jack that we hopefully hoped to land the engine on as it poured out of the Leaning Tower, that his consternation actually reached the recesses of my time-zone addled brain. "Let's use the motorcycle jack." His visage brightened considerably at the relief that I was dimly aware of the obvious. Yeah, whatever, leave me alone, we got the transaxle bolted up to the engine, and slid the whole motorcycle jack big whoop over to the car and managed to skate it under the rear apron and eventually get it hooked up. Sure, that was Day One.
Next day, we dug into the ancilliaries, wires and fuel hoses and the fuel pump and grounds (he welded a new ground strap stud on the left diagonal arm support, pretty trick! ) and Bowden tubes and clutch cables and accelerator cables after the accelerator link was dislodged from its jam on the accelerator pedal, and everything and stuff, where's the gear shifter? We need that to shove the shift rod rearward to engage it with the transaxle's shift rod. That was a most interesting occasion, to not have any point of reference to set the transmission into the gear we needed to assemble the shift rod/coupler and then do the stop plate. I did a bang-up job of making sure that you could never shift from 3rd to 2nd without pressing down firmly on the gear shift knob. Safety, you know. Eventually, it was reverse that was properly locked out.
No running or turning over the engine allowed without idiot lights, so we stuck the factory sender on the hose for the big gauge display's sending unit, we had to make a terribly hack ground wire to ground the factory sender which was expecting actual engine case grounding. Beginning to look a little HACK around here, well, we're running out of time, plastic tie the fuel pump to the frame, done! plastic tie the horrible three-pleat useless Rockford CV boots, done! squish a cheap Chinese ring terminal on the end of the alternator feed wire, not done! (he found a pretty decent heavy-duty ring terminal instead), our wiring of the fuel pump looked pretty HACK, but you know what?
I didn't care.
All of
his work was first-class careful and thorough, I only wanted to execute his Main Goal:
Make it run for the first time in 17 years.
We did it. We made it run.
Now he has to go re-do our tackytastic crapimprov show up to first-class careful and thorough. And he will.
It was a total pleasure to meet you and your beautiful family, white74westy.
Colin
( tell your stupid sprinkler system THANKS A LOT for showing me that my windows all leak. They all have to come out, AGAIN. So does the windshield. It leaks, too)